FXFlow: GeForceFX Watercooling Revisited

Foreword by Richard Swinburne: It's amazing what we've got buried in our CMS sometimes. This little gem managed to slip through the net for nearly seven years now - and it's about time one of the earliest waterblocks that promoted awesome style and effective cooling was revised.

As much as Nvidia would probably like to forget the FX series, the fact that it was so hot and needed the infamous "leaf blower" means that watercooling was inevitable.

So here we are, a short but sweet blast from the past: the FXFlow! Nvidia's GeForceFX, Watercooled!

GeForceFX Watercooling by BladeRunner

Originally Published: 23rd March 2003
There are times in your life where you feel like everything in your life is going wrong, where everything you do seems to suck. Then, just occasionally, you will do something that totally kicks ass, and makes you realise why you're in this crazy game called life.

This, my friends, is one of those times. We've seen GeForceFX but what you might not have known until now is that bit-tech has had a very special project being worked on in the background since before FX was even launched.

You guys noticed BladeRunner coming to contribute in our community? Well, having such a prestigious talent on the team wasn't a mere co-incidence - we conceived a project that was so funky, we just had to combine resources and pull it off. Along the way, we have also had more than a helping hand from NVIDIA and from Gainward to get this done.

We have put so much effort into this. The original cooler was designed and prototyped right back at the launch of the FX technology in November and, get this, was designed using the original press photographs released to us by NVIDIA. When I tell you that BladeRunner has put 100s of hours of work into this, believe it. From the original design plans made to photographs, we were lucky enough to receive one of the first FX boards into the country direct from NVIDIA to finish our design on. We have tweaked and played with the design to get it into it's state now.

And this is where the guys at Gainward come in. Gainward has been behind us the whole way, as you might expect from a company whose main business is catering to the enthusiast market. They have been helping us out with technical difficulties, even providing us with another board when we killed ours during production (yes, there may be as few as 100k ready for the shelves, and we've killed one already). However, when they saw what we had produced they were blown away, and this is the good part: we have agreed a deal with Gainward where this cooler will go into production. You may well have read the press release from Gainward this morning. But that was only the initial product announcement : the bottom line is, you guys will be able to go out and buy a Gainward graphics card with a BladeRunner designed bit-tech watercooler on it.

But enough of that. Let's just show you what the hell we have been beavering away at for the last 4 months. You can click through the pics for the beauty shots.

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This, of course, is FXFlow. Much derided, not least by us as a quiet and efficient cooling solution. $400 graphics card? Pah. FXFlow makes it worth twice that once we're finished with it!

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It's our very own, custom designed, custom fabricated, bit-tech GeForceFX waterblock kit: one for the core, two for the ram, and one snazzy retention block to hold it all in place.

Naturally, it fits perfectly.

After some polishing up, the FX retention clip is one shiny mofo. These have been engineered to be absolutely perfect with measurement, despite only working from photographs. The kit of blocks are designed not to short any connectors or trash surface mounts or capacitors.

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See, the FX is even the right way up when mounted so you can see it through your case window!

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No more leaf blower! Can you say '1-slot cooling solution'?

'How does it perform?!' I hear you cry? How about 550/1,100MHz perfectly stable at just 30C as opposed to the default of 500/1,000MHz at ~60C. This is one gorgeous looking cooler, and we've designed it to have the performance to match (Ed: Hindsight LOL). We are tremendously excited to have what we believe is the first custom-designed GeForceFX watercooler in the world.